Another ID Argument Doesn’t Stand Up to Scrutiny
Over at casa de Dembski,
DaveScot tries to debunk a debunking of an ID argument. It goes
something like this:
Michael Behe: The bacterial flagellum is irreducibly
complex, that is, all of its components need to be in place before
it’ll work. It can’t have evolved by gradual addition and improvement,
because none of the subparts do anything until they’re all put
together.
Nick Matzke: Ah, but the Type Three Secretory System (TTSS), a
sort of bacterial syringe, is made up of proteins that look an awful
lot like ones used in the flagellum. That is, you can build
something useful using just some of the parts requied for a
flagellum, and that gives natural selection something to work with.
For instance, the flagellum could have evolved by adding parts to a TTSS.
DaveScot:
Ah, but I have here a paper about a species of bacterium that started
out with a flagellum, but lost most of its parts through natural
selection, leaving only the parts needed to construct a TTSS.
To which I reply below the fold.
This is a red herring: Behe’s original claim that the flagellum is
irreducibly complex (IC) and therefore could not have evolved
rests on the assumption that natural selection cannot select
for any subset of its components, since none of them do anything
useful.
Matzke effectively demolished that assumption by showing that at least
one subset of the flagellum’s parts—specifically, those used for
building the TTSS—are useful, and therefore natural selection
could have provided those parts as something to build upon to make a
flagellum.
DaveScot’s paper, then, doesn’t demolish Matzke’s argument. At best,
it weakens it a tiny bit (if we assume that the TTSS is the only
possible useful subassembly of the flagellum; this seems dubious,
because in nature, there’s very rarely just one of anything; if one
subassembly is useful, it seems likely that another is, as well).
Shorter version:
Behe: Evolution of the flagellum could not have
happened.
Matzke: Yes it could. For instance, TTSS.
DaveScot: But that’s not how it did happen.
Or try a different argument with the same structure:
Behe: Mormons could not have walked from New York to
Utah in the 19th century. It’s simply too far. So they must have been
airlifted.
Matzke: Actually, they could have walked from New York to Iowa,
and from Iowa to Utah. You’ll concede that neither one of those trips
is too far to walk.
DaveScot: Ah, but historical evidence shows that that’s not the
route they took.
Just in passing, I wouldn’t mind seeing a diagram of this argument,
since I’m refuting DaveScot’s refutation of Matzke’s refutation of
Behe.
PCDR Says:
Yes, your argument is stupid, Behe’s is unsupported, and DaveScot appears to be on the wrong page. Matzke is the only scientist in that room.
Aren’t you supposed to be somewhere else defending your (plagiarized) disagreement with computer simulations of eye evolution? Chop chop Sparky, get to it.nn1
Or try a different argument with the same structure:
Behe: Native Hawaiians could not have walked from Asia to
Hawaii in the 18th century. It’s simply too far and impossible because of the water. So they must have use boats.
Matzke: Actually, they could have walked from Asia to the Philippines,
and from the Philippines to Hawaii. You’ll concede that neither one of those trips
is too far to walk and not impossible because they are connected by dirt.
DaveScot: Ah, but historical evidence shows that that’s not the
route they took.
This is a stupid argument. It seems to me like saying an eye could evolve because it is made up of cells and the big toe is made of similar cells so the eye simply evolved from parts used in a previously evolved big toe. This is not Science or even logic, but just religious adherance to the faith of evolution.